WhyteRaven74:tinfoil-hat maggie: except he really was an ass when he tried to take break his company from investors.

As for the investors, the Dodge brothers. Henry was not exactly thrilled Ford dividends were going into the pockets of two men who were seeking to compete with him. To be fair, given the circumstances I can't exactly blame him for being so irked.

True, but lot's of new's lately about how befits from a job will be spent, granted yea from what I understand the Dodge's were asses.

Amos Quito:Are you starting to catch a glimpse? Or is this too much information for one evening?

Your scenario is nice, too bad it's not based in anything but textbook reality. In actual reality you ignore far too much and put too much blame on the "other". As I mentioned with making cloth, old equipment is not a good thing. I remember when they showed a textile mill in North Carolina lamenting how it shut down, it had equipment from the 1910s and 20s inside. How on God's earth did they ever expect to stay in business when they had equipment so old? Equipment from the 60s would've allowed far greater production at the same cost. Equipment from the 80s would've allowed for greater production still at the same cost. If you can't bother to update your equipment at least once every couple decades, you can't complain when someone does the same thing for less. You could do it for less but you refuse to spend the money to do so.

Way back in 1970 someone was making a ruckus that Chevy had to start focusing on quality more than anything else. Who was that person? John Delorean, head of the Chevy division. Yeah, THAT John Delorean. He actually got his way with the Vega until control of the production facility was turned over from Chevy itself to GM's production division. What's oft overlooked is the people working the assembly line were upset by this, that they were being told in effect to make bad cars. As for Delorean, he was so fed up with GM he quit. Then there's the story of Ford and how they were told time and again to start building not only quality cars but small fuel efficient cars that many people wanted and also something besides huge gas guzzling vans. Who was this person telling Ford to do this? Lee Iaccoca, the CEO of Ford. Ford refused to listen and when he wouldn't shut up about giving people what they actually want, he was fired. Yep, he was fired because he wouldn't stop pushing for Ford to build what people actually wanted.

Go ahead blame the lack of isolationist trade policy, truth of the matter is, it's the people in charge that screwed things up. Had GM listened to Delorean and Ford to Iaccoca, there'd be no talk today about their difficulties in the 80s, they would've avoided them all together. Just as the textile would have been just fine had they bothered to replace their production equipment every couple of decades. Oh as for electronics makers? That's where the profit margin thing comes in. You had people who refused to sacrifice a few percent in profit margin on top of refusing to give people what they want, so when others gave people what they wanted, they were super screwed.

The Doge brothers were asses, beyond thinking Henry Ford should provide them with money in the form of dividends for their own car making endeavors. It also needs to be noted that when Ford got rid of dividends the only people who thought of it as actually actionable, were the Dodge brothers. No one else sued Ford, though a few sold off their shares. It reminds me a bit of Kirk Kerkorian, who has in the past bought up sizable stakes in various companies then six months later expressed his displeasure with how they are run even though they were run that way before he bought his shares. If he doesn't like how the company is run, why did he buy the shares? And given he's a minority share holder, why should anyone give a shiat what he thinks? And yes Kerkorian has numerous times threatened law suits.

SacriliciousBeerSwiller:Our nation is wealthier than it has ever been, but that wealth is being hoarded upwards. I don't blame the uber-wealthy by default...it's just that money attracts money. The more you have, the easier it is to earn more while doing less for it. This is why a progressive tax system is necessary. biatch about it all you want, but it's the only way.

I've been toying with the opposite idea, actually: Instead of progressive taxes for the rich (or, perhaps, in complement to them) and Instead of giving a mandatory wage rate ($9/hr), it may be better to increase the payroll tax burden on corporations that pay under Cost-Of-Living +$7,500 per year. Use the tax rate to basically elevate the cost of the employee until that basic COL+7.5K rate is met for their area, increase the tax percentage.

So if an area's cost of living is $20,000 and you are paying them $12/hr, you are giving them $24,960 gross, which is under $27,500. So a company's tax for that payroll would be the standard payroll tax plus (27,500-24,960) or $2,540. This would allow them to compete between areas in the US (XX is cheaper than YY location), but would make them pay a minimum either to the employee or to the government.

Part time would follow the same rule, but some percentage of COL and then add the 7,500 (say 55% of COL + 7,500?), which means that they can't just hire 40x 1Hour-Per-Week employees like some places try to do now to get around the new wage rules. It actively penalizes the employers for shenanigans with payroll positions and ensures a usable wage. If you want part-time (semi-retired, going to school, shooting up heroin) you can still make a decent rate, but it won't let you live alone.

zepillin:seadoo2006: Either there will be a return to focus on the working class/poor/middle class...or there will be revolt.

America doesn't have the balls to revolt. Not any more.

Thought occupy might actually turn into something.

May be last summer would be another summer of LOVE.

yeah, right

I think Occupy Wall Street was intended to be a new version of the old-fashioned 70s-style "consciousness-raising" but it fell short because #1) people assumed it was meant to be a new political party (it wasn't), and #2) it scared enough target groups (Wall Street, etc.) that they pulled out all the stops in getting it shut down (shipping the homeless to OWS rallies, siccing the police to tear gas them, inventing stories of rape/murder/drug use/hippie-like activity, etc.).

I'd very much like to see OWS 2: Electric Boogaloo -- this time with the intention of becoming a political party, rather than just "an airing of the grievances."

When we import from anywhere else in the world we are only able to so because of inexpensive fuel. The simple solution is to charge "environmental" taxes on petroleum fueled transportation. Items that are producec closer to home dont have to be shipped as far.As long as we keep subsidizing big oil there is no way in hell this will all change. Make people pay the true price for goods (including full cost of fuel, environmental cleanup of every refinery and toxic waste resulting from production of goods, and full cost of humane wages) and big businesses will quickly start building here.On another note...Detroit is dead, but most Asian auto makers now produce cars here. Why? Because its less expensive in the longrun.

freakay:When we import from anywhere else in the world we are only able to so because of inexpensive fuel. The simple solution is to charge "environmental" taxes on petroleum fueled transportation. Items that are producec closer to home dont have to be shipped as far.As long as we keep subsidizing big oil there is no way in hell this will all change. Make people pay the true price for goods (including full cost of fuel, environmental cleanup of every refinery and toxic waste resulting from production of goods, and full cost of humane wages) and big businesses will quickly start building here.On another note...Detroit is dead, but most Asian auto makers now produce cars here. Why? Because its less expensive in the longrun.

I'll just say this....How would you tax fuel bought over seas? I think the word you're looking for is tariffsAlso most of the new auto plants that have been built are given tax-free status for years(from the state they move to) as well as .those states are anti union so most workers make half or a quarter of what their union counterparts used to make.

WordyGrrl:I think Occupy Wall Street was intended to be a new version of the old-fashioned 70s-style "consciousness-raising" but it fell short because #1) people assumed it was meant to be a new political party (it wasn't), and #2) it scared enough target groups (Wall Street, etc.) that they pulled out all the stops in getting it shut down (shipping the homeless to OWS rallies, siccing the police to tear gas them, inventing stories of rape/murder/drug use/hippie-like activity, etc.).

I'd very much like to see OWS 2: Electric Boogaloo -- this time with the intention of becoming a political party, rather than just "an airing of the grievances."

The issue I found with Occupy was that they didn't really communicate their goal or ideals early on when the media was interested. That left most of America scratching their heads at it. The head cracking came later, but at the beginning, no one really had a clue what was going on. Add to that the fact that everyone would talk to the press and you'd get radically different stories from different journalists who talked to different people.

Guy 1 would go "We want bankers held to their ears for their farkery!"Guy 2 would go "We want a socialist utopia!"Guy 3 would go "I want the government to give me every square dollar it makes!"Guy 4 would go "America's too stupid to understand what we are doing here. That's why WE have gotta do it!"

So if you went to research what the heck was going on and why you cared, you would get confused. If you just heard it from one news source, you'd have a 25% chance of going "YEAH!" 50% chance of going "Wow. They are crazy and/or that will never happen." and a 25% chance of getting insulted and going "I think I'm smart....".

And THEN you had the Occupy movement getting crap from every direction after about two weeks, and finally were brought down via force. Some people I talk to, even now, still think Occupy was a front for a new socialist or communist movement and dismiss it as either misguided or not American. It's sad that a populist movement was ultimately destroyed by it's own lack of cohesive communication.

WordyGrrl:zepillin: seadoo2006: Either there will be a return to focus on the working class/poor/middle class...or there will be revolt.

America doesn't have the balls to revolt. Not any more.

Thought occupy might actually turn into something.

May be last summer would be another summer of LOVE.

yeah, right

I think Occupy Wall Street was intended to be a new version of the old-fashioned 70s-style "consciousness-raising" but it fell short because #1) people assumed it was meant to be a new political party (it wasn't), and #2) it scared enough target groups (Wall Street, etc.) that they pulled out all the stops in getting it shut down (shipping the homeless to OWS rallies, siccing the police to tear gas them, inventing stories of rape/murder/drug use/hippie-like activity, etc.).

I'd very much like to see OWS 2: Electric Boogaloo -- this time with the intention of becoming a political party, rather than just "an airing of the grievances."

I thought the silent walk of shame was brilliantI hoped it was a beginning, turned out it was the endmultitude's airing grievances can and have affected real changes in labor and warI don't see it happening again here ever in a long long time, if at alland effective third parties in America ?

miniflea:You know the science fiction trope that technology will reach a level where physical labor is all but eliminated and that society will become a sort of utopia where no one wants for anything and all are free to pursue the arts or some such?

You can live the dream of valueless labor today: don't learn to do anything anyone wants. Bingo! Personal utopia!

Arsten:The issue I found with Occupy was that they didn't really communicate their goal or ideals early on when the media was interested.

The media was never interested beyond dismissing their grievances out of hand and painting them as willfully unemployed hippies engaging in rabble rousing. Instead of the media broadcasting commentary about the the nation's wealth being siphoned away to a handful of the population or the repeal of Glass-Steagall and the subsequent intermingling of investment and commercial banking which helped make the whole collapse possible we got talking heads pretending to be blind and deaf.

generallyso:Arsten: The issue I found with Occupy was that they didn't really communicate their goal or ideals early on when the media was interested.The media was never interested beyond dismissing their grievances out of hand and painting them as willfully unemployed hippies engaging in rabble rousing. Instead of the media broadcasting commentary about the the nation's wealth being siphoned away to a handful of the population or the repeal of Glass-Steagall and the subsequent intermingling of investment and commercial banking which helped make the whole collapse possible we got talking heads pretending to be blind and deaf.[i.imgur.com image 550x508]

I get that. But what I'm saying is that they made it incredibly easy to be sidelined by not having a uniform message about their goals. Like I illustrated above, their Step Up, Step Back program proved to make it easy to find someone who would rile up the populace with their views (and generating more revenue for the media reporting it) versus having a mouth piece that said "We want these points addressed!" and keeping it on topic.

It made it very easy for people to argue about what the CONTENT their message even was supposed to be versus an argument over how to react to the message. Most people in this country are working stiffs. They don't have time to go figure stuff like this out. It's why our politicians get away with so much.

You'd be wrong. The money saved isn't enough to cover the illness, the car repair, extended unemployment, etc. You threw in that mundane stuff at the end to make it seem more reasonable, but it's not. Saving will not produce enough of a return to cover the big stuff. Again, it's not that they should have to make do with less, their wages have to increase.

fatassbastard:And bear in mind I only suggested $25/paycheck. Most of us with full time jobs could do more.

Let's take the $15.80/hr example Save 5% of your annual salary at 7.25% annual return (preferably in an IRA or 401(k) so you can't spend it before retirement) and in 30 years you'll have ~$175,000. Is that "useless" too?

You'd be wrong, AGAIN. That $15.80 gets eaten up very quickly. Rising rent, rising food and fuel costs, rising utilities, stagnant wages. Heaven forbid you have any children or other dependents. $175,000 in 30 years is less than useless if you need money *now*. Wages have to increase before people can save. They're spending all of their money just trying to get by, and it's still not enough. A payoff in 30 years is meaningless if you can't make ends meet in the present.

Arsten:The issue I found with Occupy was that they didn't really communicate their goal or ideals early on when the media was interested. That left most of America scratching their heads at it. The head cracking came later, but at the beginning, no one really had a clue what was going on. Add to that the fact that everyone would talk to the press and you'd get radically different stories from different journalists who talked to different people.

Guy 1 would go "We want bankers held to their ears for their farkery!"Guy 2 would go "We want a socialist utopia!"Guy 3 would go "I want the government to give me every square dollar it makes!"Guy 4 would go "America's too stupid to understand what we are doing here. That's why WE have gotta do it!"

So if you went to research what the heck was going on and why you cared, you would get confused. If you just heard it from one news source, you'd have a 25% chance of going "YEAH!" 50% chance of going "Wow. They are crazy and/or that will never happen." and a 25% chance of getting insulted and going "I think I'm smart....".

And THEN you had the Occupy movement getting crap from every direction after about two weeks, and finally were brought down via force. Some people I talk to, even now, still think Occupy was a front for a new socialist or communist movement and dismiss it as either misguided or not American. It's sad that a populist movement was ultimately destroyed by it's own lack of cohesive communication.

My understanding is that OWS was, by and large, founded by anarchists who were very very anti-organizational and anti-hierarchy. So the lack of cohesive communication was a feature, not a bug. They eschewed hierarchy and formal leadership as a matter of principle. (See David Graeber's writings on OWS)

WhyteRaven74:Amos Quito: Are you starting to catch a glimpse? Or is this too much information for one evening?

Your scenario is nice, too bad it's not based in anything but textbook reality. In actual reality you ignore far too much and put too much blame on the "other". As I mentioned with making cloth, old equipment is not a good thing. I remember when they showed a textile mill in North Carolina lamenting how it shut down, it had equipment from the 1910s and 20s inside. How on God's earth did they ever expect to stay in business when they had equipment so old? Equipment from the 60s would've allowed far greater production at the same cost. Equipment from the 80s would've allowed for greater production still at the same cost. If you can't bother to update your equipment at least once every couple decades, you can't complain when someone does the same thing for less. You could do it for less but you refuse to spend the money to do so.

No, You're not "getting" it.

They DID upgrade their machinery. They just deployed that new equipment in a "manufacturing friendly" country. And they made huge profits by so doing.

WhyteRaven74:Go ahead blame the lack of isolationist trade policy, truth of the matter is, it's the people in charge that screwed things up. Had GM listened to Delorean and Ford to Iaccoca, there'd be no talk today about their difficulties in the 80s, they would've avoided them all together. Just as the textile would have been just fine had they bothered to replace their production equipment every couple of decades. Oh as for electronics makers? That's where the profit margin thing comes in. You had people who refused to sacrifice a few percent in profit margin on top of refusing to give people what they want, so when others gave people what they wanted, they were super screwed.

Unions and environmental regulation, coupled with the general costs of operating in a nation with (comparatively) high wages / regulation across the board, the cost/benefit analysis quickly leads to offshore production.

Corporations are profit-driven, and the quest for profits drove the manufacturing off-shore.

You can entertain us with anecdotes about Iacocca and Delorian, and bad decisions that were made before you were born, but the bottom line is that manufacturing in the US is dead, and the credit for that, friend, is due much more to government policy than to market factors.

Of course its a tariff...however, Im just saying remove all subsidies from petro companies and then tax usage. Yes, jack up gas prices to reflect the real cost of using gas, like highways and bridges. We shouldnt quit importing crap from China to save US jobs. We shouldnt import that crap because at the end of the day its stupid to do so and not pay the real expense to do so. tinfoil-hat maggie: freakay: When we import from anywhere else in the world we are only able to so because of inexpensive fuel. The simple solution is to charge "environmental" taxes on petroleum fueled transportation. Items that are producec closer to home dont have to be shipped as far.As long as we keep subsidizing big oil there is no way in hell this will all change. Make people pay the true price for goods (including full cost of fuel, environmental cleanup of every refinery and toxic waste resulting from production of goods, and full cost of humane wages) and big businesses will quickly start building here.On another note...Detroit is dead, but most Asian auto makers now produce cars here. Why? Because its less expensive in the longrun.

I'll just say this....How would you tax fuel bought over seas? I think the word you're looking for is tariffsAlso most of the new auto plants that have been built are given tax-free status for years(from the state they move to) as well as .those states are anti union so most workers make half or a quarter of what their union counterparts used to make.

Ontos:How to not be a burger flipper:Step one: Put down the bong, moron.Step two: Stop playing video games 85% of your waking lifeStep three: Actually wear a clean, pressed shirt to a job interview and stop with the farking texting during the interview.Step four: Avoid neck tattoosThat should get you most of the way there. You're on your own for the rest of it.

fatassbastard:WhyteRaven74: funny how it's always up to the income earners to scratch by with a little less, and never up to those who pay the incomes to actually start paying decent incomes again. After all they're perfect, nothing they do is ever wrong, right?

Whether or not the "job creators" should be paying more (they probably should) is not at all the point I'm trying to make. All I'm saying is, if you save a little bit out of every paycheck, you'll be better prepared to face whatever comes in the future. And if people are paying less than they should, doesn't that make it even more important to save?

broadsword: Everytime I hear someone parroting about the stock market I remember a time where everyone believed Enron was rock solid.

So, your argument against saving in the broader stock market (the S&P 500 has returned an average of 9.3% since 1928, before the Great Depression: http://tinyurl.com/5jhm7) is to pick out one individual spectacular failure? That's like never flying because you saw one plane crash on TV.

At least the airline industry follows regulations... Enron / 2008 GFC were cases when everything got turned up on it's ass and no-one learnt any lessons from it.

Amos Quito:Corporations are profit-driven, and the quest for profits drove the manufacturing off-shore.

You can entertain us with anecdotes about Iacocca and Delorian, and bad decisions that were made before you were born, but the bottom line is that manufacturing in the US is dead, and the credit for that, friend, is due much more to government policy than to market factors.

But the quest for profits which drove the manufacturing off-shore is explicitly a market factor...

LouDobbsAwaaaay:Amos Quito: Corporations are profit-driven, and the quest for profits drove the manufacturing off-shore.

You can entertain us with anecdotes about Iacocca and Delorian, and bad decisions that were made before you were born, but the bottom line is that manufacturing in the US is dead, and the credit for that, friend, is due much more to government policy than to market factors.

But the quest for profits which drove the manufacturing off-shore is explicitly a market factor...

A "market factor" that was explicitly created by government intervention in the form of regulation (and the lack thereof in the form of malignant trade policies).

I ask you, was the interest of the American People served in these policies?

Amos Quito:the bottom line is that manufacturing in the US is dead, and the credit for that, friend, is due much more to government policy than to market factors

Dead? I think you're overstating it a bit. US manufacturing was #1 in the world until 2010, when we were overtaken by China. Now we're #2 in the world. (source) There are two reasons for this:

1) There are 1.3 billion Chinese. This fact alone should put them in the top spot by default. The fact that it took them until 2010 to produce more than us, given THIS kind of manpower, is pretty pathetic.

2) Chinese labor is dirt cheap because they don't worry about things like paying a living wage, workplace safety, health care, pensions, retirement, or pollution. The working conditions are so bad over there that most Americans would consider it slavery. It's hard to compete with that, short of doing the same thing ourselves.

But you're right to say that government policy is screwing us by providing corporate incentives to move manufacturing overseas. I don't think that's the entire problem though.

lousy screw:My questions are; was the economic structure that produced such a huge middle class in America a false one? Was it all a pyramid scheme that was destined to collapse? Is the very notion of a free economy without huge wealth disparities even practical on a scale as big as the American one? Or is a new model conceivable that would put a healthy percentage of Americans back to work at good wages, without raping the environment and putting lives at risk?

Is it possible to put Americans back to work without huge environmental costs? Not really. The entire point of America's economy after WW2 was cheap exploitation of foreign labor and capital. That foreign labor and capital isn't enough to prop up what we have now, so how could it be in the future? We don't have another continent to despoil and poison. The only thing left is exploiting ideas from our countrymen (good, mind you), but we have predicated that on a very bad educational foundation that hates creativity, so just how much is there left to exploit? How much more of a pound of flesh can we carve out of this rotten corpse?

It's a cluster fark on a global scale, and that's the best I can tell you. Tip your bartenders well, and pay your respects to farmers and truckers that bring the meat and veggies home. You'll see a lot more in the future because there are only so many mines and faculty positions open. That's the best case scenario, because it can easily devolve into global civil wars.

Maybe we'll wake up one day without a job to speak of among us and we collectively say "fark it all" and live a life that mother nature can support.

Yep, and unfortunatly those in the Tech/IT world have fallen behind in working knowledge and are having difficulty in finding employment in their former fields. So they are left behind, stuck at lower wage employment, trying to hook any tech job that will get them back in the game. But it ain't easy with so many younger people with recent training that are filling up spots at a lower wage than older people might be looking for.

8Fingers:Yep, and unfortunatly those in the Tech/IT world have fallen behind in working knowledge and are having difficulty in finding employment in their former fields. So they are left behind, stuck at lower wage employment, trying to hook any tech job that will get them back in the game. But it ain't easy with so many younger people with recent training that are filling up spots at a lower wage than older people might be looking for.

Arsten:SacriliciousBeerSwiller: Our nation is wealthier than it has ever been, but that wealth is being hoarded upwards. I don't blame the uber-wealthy by default...it's just that money attracts money. The more you have, the easier it is to earn more while doing less for it. This is why a progressive tax system is necessary. biatch about it all you want, but it's the only way.

I've been toying with the opposite idea, actually: Instead of progressive taxes for the rich (or, perhaps, in complement to them) and Instead of giving a mandatory wage rate ($9/hr), it may be better to increase the payroll tax burden on corporations that pay under Cost-Of-Living +$7,500 per year. Use the tax rate to basically elevate the cost of the employee until that basic COL+7.5K rate is met for their area, increase the tax percentage.

So if an area's cost of living is $20,000 and you are paying them $12/hr, you are giving them $24,960 gross, which is under $27,500. So a company's tax for that payroll would be the standard payroll tax plus (27,500-24,960) or $2,540. This would allow them to compete between areas in the US (XX is cheaper than YY location), but would make them pay a minimum either to the employee or to the government.

Part time would follow the same rule, but some percentage of COL and then add the 7,500 (say 55% of COL + 7,500?), which means that they can't just hire 40x 1Hour-Per-Week employees like some places try to do now to get around the new wage rules. It actively penalizes the employers for shenanigans with payroll positions and ensures a usable wage. If you want part-time (semi-retired, going to school, shooting up heroin) you can still make a decent rate, but it won't let you live alone.

Congratulations! You just made an insanely and needlessly complex tax system infinitely MORE complex, which I wasn't sure was even possible. Bravo. Doing taxes for a company like Wal Mart would be almost completely impossible under your system. Not that they would pay the tax anyways. They would just hire lobbyists to legally bribe Congress to grant them loopholes big enough to drive a planet through to make sure that those taxes never got paid. I'm sorry, did I say bribe? I meant speech. They'll throw lots and lots of speech at Congress. Bribery is illegal and wrong. Everybody knows that. Your Supreme Court, however, has determined that money is speech and corporations are people. This wouldn't be companies bribing Congress, this would be people giving lots and lots and LOTS of speech to Congress. Until that changes, we're all screwed.

It's all about corporate culture. Our nationwide corporate culture is one that collects wealth to the point that Scrooge himself blush yet extends no friendly gesture to the workers. Our nationwide corporate culture is one that whines incessantly about how it is so difficult to find qualified applicants yet at the same time despises training and demands years of experience for every posting. Our nationwide corporate culture is one that eschews long-term growth for short-term gains. Our nationwide corporate culture is one that axes loyal employees for the sake of a distant, mewling shareholder.

You're not part of the problem. You are the problem. You are our nationwide corporate culture. You define it. It's been said that we deserve the politicians we elect, but the wound runs deeper than that. We deserve the culture we allow.

ReapTheChaos:"These jobs, which account for 33% of all private sector jobs, pay an average of $15.80 per hour."

$15.80 an hour is a pretty decent wage in most places. You wont live like a king, but you'll manage. The problem is people are spoiled. They think they need to drive a new car, have the best furnishings in their house, $80 a month cable Tv on their 50" flat screens, $200 cell phones with a $75 monthly plan and a slew of other crap that you can live without.

Hell, $15.80 an hour is more than I'm making.

I think the problem is that people thing they will have it as good as their boomer/yuppie parents, and that is not going to happen. That was mostly luck. Those times will not come back.

xerge:ReapTheChaos: "These jobs, which account for 33% of all private sector jobs, pay an average of $15.80 per hour."

$15.80 an hour is a pretty decent wage in most places. You wont live like a king, but you'll manage. The problem is people are spoiled. They think they need to drive a new car, have the best furnishings in their house, $80 a month cable Tv on their 50" flat screens, $200 cell phones with a $75 monthly plan and a slew of other crap that you can live without.

Hell, $15.80 an hour is more than I'm making.

I think the problem is that people thing they will have it as good as their boomer/yuppie parents, and that is not going to happen. That was mostly luck. Those times will not come back.

I see it a slightly different way.

Seems to me the boomers think everyone after them have the same opportunities as boomers did. And therefor if someone is flipping hamburgers then they must be failures.

WhyteRaven74:Amos Quito: Are you starting to catch a glimpse? Or is this too much information for one evening?

Your scenario is nice, too bad it's not based in anything but textbook reality. In actual reality you ignore far too much and put too much blame on the "other". As I mentioned with making cloth, old equipment is not a good thing. I remember when they showed a textile mill in North Carolina lamenting how it shut down, it had equipment from the 1910s and 20s inside. How on God's earth did they ever expect to stay in business when they had equipment so old? Equipment from the 60s would've allowed far greater production at the same cost. Equipment from the 80s would've allowed for greater production still at the same cost. If you can't bother to update your equipment at least once every couple decades, you can't complain when someone does the same thing for less. You could do it for less but you refuse to spend the money to do so.

Way back in 1970 someone was making a ruckus that Chevy had to start focusing on quality more than anything else. Who was that person? John Delorean, head of the Chevy division. Yeah, THAT John Delorean. He actually got his way with the Vega until control of the production facility was turned over from Chevy itself to GM's production division. What's oft overlooked is the people working the assembly line were upset by this, that they were being told in effect to make bad cars. As for Delorean, he was so fed up with GM he quit. Then there's the story of Ford and how they were told time and again to start building not only quality cars but small fuel efficient cars that many people wanted and also something besides huge gas guzzling vans. Who was this person telling Ford to do this? Lee Iaccoca, the CEO of Ford. Ford refused to listen and when he wouldn't shut up about giving people what they actually want, he was fired. Yep, he was fired because he wouldn't stop pushing for Ford to build what people actually wanted.

Go ahead blame the lack of is ...

I work in an Indiana auto widget manufacturing (truth) so I'm getting a kick out of your arguments

In actual reality you're both right. Free Trade was a great idea on paper that IRL was taken shameless advantage of by the same greedy selfish people who wouldn't invest in their companies. Now those former Capital Investments Officers are CEO's and Directors with the attitude that a LOT now/once is better than a moderate amount every year for decades.

My widget company announced a 16 million $ profit one quarter but said they couldn't pay out our promised bonuses because that 16mil profit was really a loss because the stockholders wanted to make more than that

mod3072:Part time would follow the same rule, but some percentage of COL and then add the 7,500 (say 55% of COL + 7,500?), which means that they can't just hire 40x 1Hour-Per-Week employees like some places try to do now to get around the new wage rules. It actively penalizes the employers for shenanigans with payroll positions and ensures a usable wage. If you want part-time (semi-retired, going to school, shooting up heroin) you can still make a decent rate, but it won't let you live alone.

Congratulations! You just made an insanely and needlessly complex tax system infinitely MORE complex, which I wasn't s ...

How is it needlessly complex? Companies pay based on the Cost of Living. Which is better than the minimum wage because it's calculated yearly. And a company pays whether you pay your staff $1 a year or the full COL+7500.

I say this because if you look at the MW over time, you'll see that in every single year since it's inception, the MW's value has fallen, except in years that Congress increased the MW. That's why the 7.25 (which wasn't a whole lot of value at that point, anyway) that was set in 2007 is no longer even survivable. The value of the dollar has changed. Instead of leaving the lowest workers to the wolves, how about we set a minimum that's not only survivable but sustainable?

This way, every year you can go "Cost of Living is X, therefor your wage is COL+7500". I'm sure that companies will bribe Congress based upon the want to keep their dollars, but just because more than one part of the system is messed up doesn't mean that you can't fix it one piece at a time.

Majick Thise: I work in an Indiana auto widget manufacturing (truth) so I'm getting a kick out of your arguments

In actual reality you're both right. Free Trade was a great idea on paper that IRL was taken shameless advantage of by the same greedy selfish people who wouldn't invest in their companies. Now those former Capital Investments Officers are CEO's and Directors with the attitude that a LOT now/once is better than a moderate amount every year for decades.

My widget company announced a 16 million$ profitone quarter but saidthey couldn't pay out our promised bonuses because that 16mil profit wasreally a loss because the stockholders wanted to make more than that

Honestly, the Free Trade agreements were expected to send jobs overseas by much of the media I was watching during Bush Sr/Clinton's time at getting them negotiated and signed. It seemed that no one in power cared and in fact stated the opposite.

It's really all they do. They've long-since stopped bothering with reality. The stimulus checks that Bush Jr put out were sold as a way to help the economy, except that it did not. The bail outs of the car manufacturers and banks was sold to help the little guy....except it did not. The Green Energy subsidies were supposed to create more jobs than they killed from traditional energy, but they did not.

Now, while I'm not a magic purveyor of truth (And I have 20/20 hindsight which makes it easier to back-seat drive), the actual solutions were closer to:A) Forgive the credit debts of ordinary Americans on unsecured loans and taxes (credit cards, student loans, IRS, state taxes, etc but NOT cars or houses) and forgive all value lost in the housing markets on the loans (Bought a home for $200,000 and now worth $100,000 and have $175,000 left on the loan? Congrats, you now have $100,000 left on the loan.) - Without this crushing debt, the average person could spend money on useless bullcrap again.

B) Let the banks and auto manufacturers fail. What usually happens when a company fails is other companies buy up it's assets. So Ford would have had it's plants and such bought by, say, Toyota. The banks would get purchased by other banks. - It wouldn't be all rosy, but now what happens in the economic crash next decade? We bail them out again?

C) Invest research money into green energy R&D until it was actually ready to hit the limelight and compete without subsidy with traditional energy. This way you don't really "create jobs" (500 research positions really isn't even a drop in the bucket) but you advance both the green platform and the ability for them to compete in the future.

Arsten:The bail outs of the car manufacturers and banks was sold to help the little guy....except it did not

I still have a job directly because of the bailout. Our business is higher than it has ever been in 30 years at this location directly because of Cash for Clunkers and yet we laid off close to 300 in 2008 and cut the pay of those who stayed but have only hired back about 70. No pay raises or bonuses have been given. Despite the massive increase in productivity and lowered wage/benefit the cost cars didn't get any cheaper and my GM supplier discount did. Sigh..

N-deutetrei: Arsten: And THEN you had the Occupy movement getting crap from every direction after about two weeks, and finally were brought down via force. Some people I talk to, even now, still think Occupy was a front for a new socialist or communist movement and dismiss it as either misguided or not American. It's sad that a populist movement was ultimately destroyed by it's own lack of cohesive communication.

My understanding is that OWS was, by and large, founded by anarchists who were very very anti-organizational and anti-hierarchy. So the lack of cohesive communication was a feature, not a bug. They eschewed hierarchy and formal leadership as a matter of principle. (See David Graeber's writings on OWS)

Remember when the police/thugs started wading into the crowds and demanding to know "Who are your leaders?" They thought that jailing the leaders would silence a group that was shining a bad light on Wall Street/corporations/the 1%, etc. OWS wasn't intended to be a "new populist political party" with leaders and a platform, etc. It was just a "consciousness-raising"/demonstration.

OWS definitely had some legitimate complaints. Why else would the wealthy and powerful of Wall Street and various corporations work so aggressively to shut them down by paying government forces (primarily police) and using the pro-corporate media to do it? The scary part is that too few Americans complained about government forces shutting down a group that exercised its right to peaceably assemble and air grievances.

Pray 4 Mojo:Yep. NY is spendy. It sucks that they won't let anybody move to a place that costs less. I think they made a movie about that.

And another logic failure.There are jobs that need doing in NYC.The people that do those jobs need to be in NYC.Unless there is a way to bend the laws of space-time, they can't be in Armpit, Wyoming and NYC at the same time.So "moving to a place that costs less" is an answer without any thought put into it.

Seriously though, I am 35 year old college educated man that believed all the hype about high tech when I was getting out of high school. So did most of my friends. I got out of high tech about 7 years ago and haven't looked back. I make more as a ditch digger then any of my cubicle dwelling friends and I am, I dare say happier.

The problem is a lot of people are afraid of labor jobs and the stigma that comes with it. Many people see ditch digging as lower then food service jobs. I have sort of embraced that with a sense of humor. I refer to myself as a french canadian albino black mexican with a speech impediment that makes me sound like an a englishman.

There are a lot of low / medium skill jobs out there that pay well, but they involve sweating and enduring the elements, and that isn't something educated white westerners do.Most construction companies have lower educational requirements then Mc Job but pay twice the wage.

Had I known how rewarding construction and the trades were I would have skipped the whole college high tech thing and done it straight out of high school.

Arsten:mod3072: Part time would follow the same rule, but some percentage of COL and then add the 7,500 (say 55% of COL + 7,500?), which means that they can't just hire 40x 1Hour-Per-Week employees like some places try to do now to get around the new wage rules. It actively penalizes the employers for shenanigans with payroll positions and ensures a usable wage. If you want part-time (semi-retired, going to school, shooting up heroin) you can still make a decent rate, but it won't let you live alone.

Congratulations! You just made an insanely and needlessly complex tax system infinitely MORE complex, which I wasn't s ...

How is it needlessly complex? Companies pay based on the Cost of Living. Which is better than the minimum wage because it's calculated yearly. And a company pays whether you pay your staff $1 a year or the full COL+7500.

I say this because if you look at the MW over time, you'll see that in every single year since it's inception, the MW's value has fallen, except in years that Congress increased the MW. That's why the 7.25 (which wasn't a whole lot of value at that point, anyway) that was set in 2007 is no longer even survivable. The value of the dollar has changed. Instead of leaving the lowest workers to the wolves, how about we set a minimum that's not only survivable but sustainable?

This way, every year you can go "Cost of Living is X, therefor your wage is COL+7500". I'm sure that companies will bribe Congress based upon the want to keep their dollars, but just because more than one part of the system is messed up doesn't mean that you can't fix it one piece at a time.

It's complex because COL varies greatly from region to region, state to state, city to city and neighborhood to neighborhood. Not only that, but it's highly subjective and fluctuates from year to year and would need to be updated every year or every quarter. Because COL is so highly variable, a corporation like Wal Mart would have a different tax rate for every store. That's one company with potentially hundreds of not thousands of different tax rates, and those rates would change every time the COL calculation changes. Not only does that add a huge amount of complexity and cost to the tax system, it also greatly increases uncertainty. A company would never know from year-to-year what their tax liability was going to be. Unless I'm completely misunderstanding your proposal, that is.

mod3072:It's complex because COL varies greatly from region to region, state to state, city to city and neighborhood to neighborhood. Not only that, but it's highly subjective and fluctuates from year to year and would need to be updated every year or every quarter. Because COL is so highly variable, a corporation like Wal Mart would have a different tax rate for every store. That'sone company with potentiallyhundreds of not thousands of different tax rates, and those rates would change every time the COL calculation changes. Not only does that add a huge amount of complexity and cost to the tax system, it also greatly increases uncertainty. A company would never know from year-to-year what their tax liability was going to be. Unless I'm completely misunderstanding your proposal, that is.

Well, first, it is complex in the fact that COL varies EVERYWHERE, but as long as you can generalize by Area Code, it's not that terrible (instead of going Gingerbread Lane has a COL of 25,000 and Gingerbread Place has a COL of 22,000). But those calculations are run yearly by the government and a bunch of private interests, already. It's not like we'd have to create a government agency of Costs of Living. And the COL would be based where your employer is, not where your own home is, so it's not like they'd have to carry more than one base wage per location, so it wouldn't even be terribly hard for businesses to keep up with it.

But, if you look at the current MW, we set the dollar/hour base and then anyone making MW gets squeezed by the value of the dollar until you go and set it, again. So it needs constant review, anyway. And I'd rather do a constant review that A) is already performed and B) is applicable to the place that business is conducted versus setting $9 and seeing people in Nebraska live like (white trash) kings while people in NYC lick the slime from garbage cans hoping to save $60 a month on grocery bills.